Pratt New Faculty Lecture Series

Talk title: Spatiotemporal control of cancer and stem cellsAbstract: Multicellular biological systems, such as tissues, are heterogeneous. Elaborate control mechanisms are in place to regulate heterogeneity, and their subversions lead to many diseases. A combination of modeling, engineering, and animal models are required to study spatiotemporal dynamics in biological systems.. In this talk, I will show how these techniques enabled us to discover how intestinal stem cell niches are controlled, and how its breakdown leads to colon cancer. I will also show how cancer cell metastasis could be manipulated by synthetic biology and how colon cancer cells reprogram themselves when they metastasize to other organs. Furthermore, new tools have been developed to study the interplay between epithelial cells, the enteric nervous system, and the immune system in live animals.